This was Delhi. Two sadhus. Two monkeys. I asked if I could take a photo. The man in the photo said “Kyu nahin?” (Why not?) The sadhu behind him called out for money, shouting, “Paisa to de do!” I ignored him. As did the monkeys.

Also from Rishikesh, this machine purports to read your mind, calibrate your thoughts (see the odometers?) and then broadcast your past, present and future through the headphones 😀 I loved it. For 20 bucks, I was told that the things I was worried about would resolve themselves, my health would improve and I’d become rich. 😀 Paisa wasooli 🙂

That’s me. I’m proud to have voted. I’m pleased to be able to exercise my rights and do my civic duty. This time was MUCH easier than the last time in 2009. I’m still the wrong age, have the wrong name, and am listed in the wrong gender, but they overlooked all that. I only drew attention to the spelling and the ‘purush’ part but both the list booth and the polling agent brushed it off as a typo. And after 3 minutes of being in line, I had verified my identity, pushed my selection, and I was out. I didn’t even get to crack open Kiran Manral’sThe Reluctant Detective that I’d thought to bring along with me based on the long wait last time! 🙂

P.S. I’m very disillusioned by my friends who haven’t voted. What do you do with your friends whose ideologies and basic values don’t match yours? Demotion? Deletion?

Usually, these say things like “Don tuch me” 😀 I thought this was an interesting variation. The cabbie was initially upset because he thought I was photographing the meter to trounce him for cheating on the fare (which he well may have been).Then I said, no, I liked his Ganeshji, and he could very well reset it to zero.

Once he was satisfied I really, truly liked it, he turned the meter back down to zero and then suggested angles from which I could get better shots 😀

So the BMC has decided it will now prune trees to prevent stray branches from falling. You know what that means, right? They’re just going to start chopping everything down in sight. My neighboring building society head told me that they’d chopped down the tree between us because “mosquitoes are breeding there”. He claims to be a horticulturist. Who never went to school, evidently. Because in his next breath he also told us it didn’t matter because “Only Tulsi” gives out oxygen, other trees are not important. I nearly slit my own wrists. Maybe these little clay gods will protect this peepul from being ‘pruned’ BMC horticulture style …

This gem from the old market in Siem Reap, Cambodia. If only I could sell MY rants, too. I have so many – from Delhi’s lack of civic sense to my uncle’s Islamophobia, to the state of our educational systems in India, not to mention the state of radio in India…. 😉
Anyway, these are handmade LADY rants 😉 Mine aren’t very ladylike, I’ll admit. So for those, you’ll really have to travel to Cambodia.

What a thrill, right? To see my brother’s film posters on buses and walls 🙂 But the movie was unfortunately timed; it released with 8 other films and was almost totally ignored by the mainstream press (Ok, the Mumbai Mirror did review it and decimated it, but the Times Group seemed to have decided to boycott it. Others said they’d had to choose three or four of the eight and “Toss” just didn’t make the cut).
So, we tried to salvage some of it by creating a buzz in the social media fraternity and while that didn’t really take off either (logistics, quick-changes of movies in theatres, I left for Cambodia), it interestingly garnered a mention as a sort of case study in Campaign India magazine. It didn’t talk about the results, but I’m glad someone noticed the effort! Read the story Do Indian Bloggers affect consumer views? here. What do you think?

Is this bliss or is this bliss? I’m not trying to romanticize the life of this beast of labor or anthropomorphize this dude here but I caught sight of him recently at Warden Road and he was so striking, I had to stop and video him. I swear to you, he looked like he had hit hay nirvana. He was smacking his lips loudly and his eyes rolled back into his head. I think there was no doubt whatsoever that he was beaming to himself in sheer happiness. So I stopped to watch, and soon a small crowd of people had also stopped to smile at the bull and each other. Well, all except the bull’s maalik. Guess he hadn’t gotten to his own fodder, yet. 😉

Thank goodness this is only supposed to happen once in this lifetime. It was such a bad experience I’d be loath to wish it on an enemy! To start with, the registration location (“Badminton Hall”) was ridiculously hard to find and there was a lone policewoman trying to impose order outside. She did eventually let 10 people in at a time. Her directions about what to do inside were literally directions: “Turn right.” What I saw is what you see. And beyond these people were ceiling high stacks of paper. After waiting in two lines (once to receive a “number” – ward? Jaago Re neglected to mention this one) this absolutely rude woman said she couldn’t accept my PAN card as proof of my date of birth (regardless of what their web site says) and if “sir” said it was ok, she’d take the voter registration application. But “sir” flipped past the PAN card and fixated on my mobile phone bill as not being valid proof of address, instead. After raising my voice and demanding his name and ID number (to the absolute unconcealed delight of at least 300 people), I finally got them to accept my application and give me the counterfoil.
It didn’t seem to matter to them that they don’t make the decision about whether my application is accepted or rejected, they’re so used to playing God, they wouldn’t even take it! I was shaking with disbelief and anger about how difficult the bureaucracy makes it for even the people who DO want to vote. 🙁
All around me, people were being turned away for missing documents. There was someone in line ahead of me who’d returned for the fourth time! Why is the correct information not publicly available? And how can these officials be this rude to fellow human beings?